Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (19 page)

Nevertheless, the flak batteries over major targets, such as Bremen, were now so many and so concentrated that they could fill the entire sky
with the dirty black layer of bursting 88mm shells, coincidentally described by bomber crews as a “carpet” so thick that you could walk on it.

The flak took a heavy toll on October 8, even though two bombardment groups of the 3rd Bombardment Division, who led the attack that day, were using Carpet. There were thirty bombers shot down that day, and twenty-six of those that limped back to England were heavily damaged, and many of these had to be written off. The two numbers together accounted for 16 percent of the number of bombers that got through to the target. Even if new aircraft were flooding into the East Anglia bases from the Arsenal of Democracy back home, planners and commanders from Eaker to Anderson to Hughes wondered how long such losses could be sustained.

Flak took its share of young American lives, but so too did the Luftwaffe, although the young American gunners also exacted a price from the defenders of the Reich. They claimed that they got 167 German fighters, which was good for sagging morale, even though everyone knew the numbers were exaggerated by multiple reports of the same kills. Postwar reviews of the Luftwaffe’s own records reveal losses of 33 fighters destroyed and 15 damaged through “enemy action” on October 8. This is still a testament to good shooting by the young Americans who were tracking airplanes flying as fast as 200 mph through crowded skies, and who were able to sight on their targets for a few seconds at best.

The next day, it was a maximum effort to the maximum distance yet flown by the Eighth Air Force to a target. On Saturday—despite Friday’s losses—378 bombers took off and headed east, some of them flying as far as 780 straight-line, one-way miles, compared to a mere 570 in the Regensburg missions. The targets were divided between Pointblank operations against the German aircraft industry and the continuing war on U-boat yards.

Having flown over the North Sea, and the narrow neck of Denmark, the strike force divided into three parts over the Baltic Sea. The first to attack were 106 bombers that struck an Arado Flugzeugwerke factory at Anklam on the Baltic coast, which manufactured subassemblies for Focke-Wulf Fw 190s.

The remaining force continued eastward for yet another two hundred miles. Of these, 96 bombers flew to Marienburg in East Prussia (now Malbork in Poland). It was here, nearly eight hundred miles from England, that Focke-Wulf had established an assembly plant under the assumption that it was reasonably safe from the Allied Combined Bomber Offensive.

At the same time, another 150 bombers targeted what was probably the largest port and shipbuilding complex east of Hamburg. Like the plane makers in Marienburg, the shipbuilders of Danzig imagined themselves, being nearly eight hundred miles from England, to be safer than their brethren in Hamburg or Bremen.

In 1980, the shipyards of Danzig—Gdansk in Polish—would be the birthplace of the Solidarity movement that accelerated the end of Polish Communist rule, but in 1943, the shipyards were part of the German Reich and building U-boats for the German Kreigsmarine. On October 9, the shipyards of Danzig, as well as those at Gdingen (Gdynia), a dozen miles to the north, were the targets of the Eighth Air Force.

Given the distance, there was certainly no chance of an VIII Fighter Command escort all the way to any of Saturday’s targets, but the distance also stymied the defenders, who had not seen USAAF bombers over their cities before. The force striking Anklam lost eighteen bombers, but the defenders farther east were taken by surprise. Compared to 17 percent losses over Anklam, where the Bf 109 and Fw 190 interceptors attacked with air-to-air rockets, the Danzig and Marienburg attackers suffered only a 4 percent loss.

The Luftwaffe scrambled everything they had, which was less than they would have had farther west, and found it costly. By their own records, the Germans lost fourteen fighters destroyed and nine damaged.

Except for the 2nd Bombardment Division, whose work at Danzig and Gdingen was judged as poor, the mission results were extraordinary. Given the anticipated element of surprise, the bombers went in at ten thousand to fourteen thousand feet, relatively lower altitudes than would have been used at more heavily defended targets, and this improved their precision considerably. Nearly every building at the Anklam factory complex was hit, and heavy damage was rendered by other units at Danzig and Gdingen.

“It was at Marienburg that the most brilliant bombing was done,” Arthur Ferguson writes. “There,
the Focke-Wulf plant was almost completely destroyed by high-explosive and incendiary bombs dropped with unprecedented accuracy.”

As Dick Hughes and others studied subsequent photoreconnaissance imagery, they could see that 286 of the 598 five-hundred-pound general purpose bombs that had been dropped at Marienburg had landed within the factory complex, and that 35 had achieved direct hits on buildings. As late as July, the bombers were putting 12.7 percent of their ordnance within one thousand feet of the aiming point, and 36.7 percent within two thousand feet. In October the accuracy numbers had increased to 27.2 percent and 53.8 percent, respectively.

In a letter to Robert A. Lovett, Henry Stimson’s assistant secretary of war for air (and future secretary of defense), Eaker called Marienburg and Anklam “the classic example of precision bombing.”

In his own analysis of Eighth Air Force operations, Arthur Ferguson credits experience and enhanced training for the improvements. He also mentions changes in tactics. Citing Eighth Air Force monthly reports, he notes that the earlier practice of having formations follow lead formations over the target resulted in the accuracy of the following formations falling off very rapidly. He notes that when this was changed, the results for the third and fourth formations improved by 58 and 105 percent, while “formations in positions still farther back showed improvement amounting to as much as 178 percent. This improvement, which more than anything else raised the average of accuracy, resulted from separating the bombing formations with great care, especially as they approached the target.”

Of course for the October 9 missions, not having the sky clogged with the Luftwaffe probably improved accuracy immeasurably.

As it was, that day was the only day during the week on which one might find anything but a black lining in the clouds.

The next day, the “maximum effort” mustered fewer bombers, of which 236 reached their target, which was the great complex of rail and highway interchanges in and around the city of Münster. In stark contrast with Danzig and Marienburg, Münster was in the heart of the Ruhr industrial region, one of the most heavily defended targets in
Festung Europa
.

Indeed, the fighters were out in force. As was often the case over the Ruhr, the Luftwaffe matched an Eighth Air Force maximum effort with a maximum effort of their own. There were fast, single-engine Bf 109s and Fw 190s, as well as larger, twin-engine aircraft, such as Bf 110 and Me
210 night fighters and Ju 88 light bombers, which were now doubling as rocket-launching night fighters. There were even Dornier Do 217 bombers lobbing rockets into the bomber formation from just outside the range of the Eighth Air Force gunners.

While the gunners would claim 183 German aircraft shot down, the Luftwaffe’s own loss records put the number at a more plausible 22 destroyed and 5 damaged.

The bomber stream first met the Luftwaffe at their IP (initial point), the start of the bomb run, and were followed by them as they entered the target area and as they withdrew and headed for home. As Arthur Ferguson writes in the official history, the fighters “flew parallel to the bombers, out of range, in groups of twenty to forty, stacked in echelon down. They then peeled off, singly or in pairs, in quick succession to attack the lowest elements of the formation.”

The 100th Bombardment Group, flying in the lead position that day, was the first to feel Luftwaffe wrath. The Germans knew that the Eighth Air Force had traditionally organized missions so that subsequent groups “bombed on” the lead group, so it was customary for the Luftwaffe interceptors to hit the lead group hard to knock them off course. The 100th, which had also flown in the Saturday and Sunday missions, launched 18 Flying Fortresses of their own on Monday from their base at Thorpe Abbots, as well as two that were “borrowed” from the 390th Bombardment Group to round out the complement to 20 bombers. Of these, six aborted over the North Sea for mechanical reasons, so there was an unlucky 13 that reached the initial point.

There began seven minutes of hell. The lead bomber was hit and was engulfed in burning aviation fuel as he began to fall. Lieutenant Jack Justice, the pilot of
Pasadena Nena
, later recalled in a document preserved on the 100th veterans’ website, that “his wing man, according to procedure, should have taken over the lead formation, instead, all five ships in his squadron followed him down, leaving our squadron with three aircraft and the high squadron with three aircraft. The Germans immediately came in at all of us and split the remaining formation all over the sky. We found ourselves completely alone.”

Justice joined another formation but was hit by a German fighter
attempting to attack the lead in this formation, taking out the number four engine of
Pasadena Nena
and sending it into a fast spin. As the plane fell from twenty thousand to five thousand feet, Justice and copilot John Shields finally managed to bring it under control. Most of the crew promptly abandoned ship, while the two pilots decided to try to fly back to England.

However, another German fighter attacked, and they too decided to bail out. Shields did not make it, but Justice did. Once on the ground, Justice evaded capture and walked to the Netherlands, where he luckily happened upon members of the Dutch resistance. The story of his amazing escape, which took him across France to the Pyrenees, across Spain to Gibraltar, and to Christmas dinner in London, is now on the 100th Bombardment Group veterans’ website, 100thbg.com.

Most of the 100th Bombardment Group’s crewmen were not so lucky. One aircraft from the group,
Royal Flush
, piloted by Lieutenant Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, made it back to England limping in on two engines, with two men badly injured. Except for Jack Justice, everyone else who survived crashing over Europe wound up as a prisoner of war. Because of a staggering series of losses going back even before Regensburg on August 17, the group earned the sobriquet “Bloody Hundredth.”

The 3rd Bombardment Division, of which the 100th was a component, lost 29 of its 119 aircraft. However, the 1st Bombardment Division, which followed them over Münster that day, lost only 1 of their 117 bombers, because of the Luftwaffe practice of throwing everything at the lead formation or stragglers.

After three consecutive days of maximum efforts, the Eighth Air Force did stand down, but only until Thursday, when the target for the day would be the long anticipated return to the ball bearing factories of Schweinfurt.

Like Dick Hughes and the EOU, Minister of Armaments Speer had long recognized the precarious nature of a bottleneck industry like bearings. As noted earlier, he was both pleased and mystified by the failure of the Allies to return to Schweinfurt soon after the August 17 raid.

“As early as September 20, 1942, I had warned Hitler that the tank production of Friedrichshafen and the ball bearing facilities in Schweinfurt were crucial to our whole effort,” Speer recalls. “Hitler thereupon ordered increased antiaircraft protection for these two cities. Actually, as I had
early recognized, the war could largely have been decided in 1943 if instead of vast but pointless area bombing the planes had concentrated on the centers of armaments production.”

Historians with the benefit of access to German files and the luxury of 20/20 hindsight have often joined Speer in criticizing the Eighth Air Force for having not come back sooner to finish the job at Schweinfurt. Speer goes on to recall that “we anxiously asked ourselves how soon the enemy would realize that he could paralyze the production of thousands of armaments plants merely by destroying five or six relatively small targets.”

How soon? The answer was two months.

However, one need look no further than the fate of the Bloody Hundredth on October 10 to understand how difficult it was to fly so deep into the increasingly defended industrial heartland of the Reich. It seemed that with each mile the bombers flew, the perils mounted exponentially. Each mile placed them farther from fighter escort support and exposed them to more opportunities for detection and tracking by German defenses, and for Luftwaffe attack.

For the attack on October 14, the Eighth Air Force planned another maximum effort, intending—and hoping—that the very mass of the attack would serve as its own protection.

The plan for August 17 had called for simultaneous attacks on Regensburg and Schweinfurt, while the October 14 plan called for two bombardment divisions to hit only Schweinfurt, in two coordinated, parallel attacks. While the two contingents in the August mission had reached the target hours apart, every effort was made to ensure that this problem would not recur in October.

On Thursday morning, 351 bombers took off from England. The 1st and 3rd Bombardment Divisions contributed 149 and 142 Flying Fortresses respectively, while the 2nd Bombardment Division launched 60 Liberators. After the Flying Fortresses attacked abreast, the Liberators would circle in from the south to deliver a coup de grâce.

One group of P-47 Thunderbolts was assigned to each division, escorting them as far as possible on the run to the target, landing to refuel, and picking them up on the way back. Longer range Lockheed P-38 Lightnings, assigned to the 55th Fighter Group, were arriving in England
around this time, but they were, unfortunately, not yet operationally available. This was only the first of many things that would go wrong that day.

As had been the case on the first Schweinfurt mission, poor weather proved to be the curse of the best laid plans. While the Flying Fortresses managed, with a great deal of difficulty and using radar in the thick cloud cover, to sort themselves into proper formations, the Liberators did not. When twenty-nine of the Liberators finally did form up, it was decided that they were too few for a deep penetration, and they were redirected to what was essentially a diversionary attack on the port of Emden.